European space agency confirms 'external servers' breached in cyberattack
The ESA is investigating the extent of the breach, while hackers share stolen files on the dark web.
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- ESA confirmed cyberattack affecting external servers used for collaborative engineering activities
- Hacker “888” claims theft of 200 GB data, including source code, tokens, and configs
- Incident follows last year’s ESA web shop breach involving a credit card skimmer
The European Space Agency (ESA) was hit with a cyberattack earlier this week and apparently lost sensitive data in the process. The agency confirmed the news on X, saying it is currently investigating the incident:
“ESA is aware of a recent cybersecurity issue involving servers located outside the ESA corporate network,” the tweet reads. “We have initiated a forensic security analysis—currently in progress—and implemented measures to secure any potentially affected devices.”
The agency stressed that the compromised servers were “outside the ESA corporate network”, suggesting that they contained data that cannot be labeled as highly sensitive.
“Our analysis so far indicates that only a very small number of external servers may have been impacted,” the tweet further explains. “These servers support unclassified collaborative engineering activities within the scientific community. All relevant stakeholders have been informed, and we will provide further updates as soon as additional information becomes available.”
200 GB worth of data
At the same time, Security Week reports that a cybercriminal with the alias ‘888’ posted a new thread on the infamous BreachForums website, taking responsibility for the breach which, they say, happened on December 18.
As per the announcement, ESA lost 200 GB worth of data, including some from private Bitbucket repositories. In its report, CyberInsider lists these types of files as being nabbed:
- Source code from private Bitbucket repositories
- CI/CD pipeline configurations
- API and access tokens
- Internal documentation
- SQL database files
- Terraform infrastructure code
- Hardcoded credentials and configuration files
They also posted a few screenshots to prove their claims, but at press time, no one analyzed the samples to see if they are authentic or not.
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